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Low gravitas warning signal

Or: making the best of one's limitations

Marco Almada

Marco Almada

— 6 min read
A small-clawed otter lies atop a bamboo raft.
Photo by Third Idea / Unsplash

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! This might or not be the last issue I write before taking a few weeks off in August, but many of you might already be in vacations. For those of you who are still around, today I will reflect a bit about the fact that I’m not a deep thinker, and how that affects my work. And, given that we are well into vacation season, there will be no job opportunities today. However, the reading recommendations and otters are still here. So, I hope you enjoy this newsletter!

A qualified defence of shallowness

Many of the best scholars I know are incredibly deep thinkers. Whenever they engage with a particular subject, they explore it with the utmost attention to detail, articulating abstraction and nuance in a way that produces sharp insight about the topic.1 I am not one of these scholars, and I don’t think I’ll ever be. While I like to think I add something to (at least some) of the academic conversations I take part in, they tend to call attention to overlooked aspects of some phenomenon or bridge strands of knowledge that go well together in my mind, rather than exhausting the topic. At first, I was very insecure about whether that meant I wouldn’t have a place as a legal scholar, but now I’d like to think this approach also has its value.

One way shallowness can contribute to scholarly conversations is by adding breadth to them. Because most of us are only human, we can only dig deep into a particular topic at the expense of generality.2 Consider, as an example, the EU’s digital acquis: there are way too many secondary and tertiary law, as well as non-legislative policy, for anyone to know all the details of everything. Individual scholars tend to specialize on a few: I know much about the GDPR, the AI Act, and the cybersecurity instruments, but I have no familiarity whatsoever with some important pieces of the framework, such as the instruments on non-personal data. Thanks to the wonders of division of labour, this means that the academic community as a whole has some degree of visibility about most of the digital legislation coming out of Brussels. Still, the silo-ing of expertise can make us miss the forest for the trees, obscuring patterns that repeat across different regulatory domains. Unless we think we are doing some Bourbaki work—laying down the foundations for some upcoming genius—any attempt to look at things as a cross-section will necessarily be shallow. Which does not make the effort any less necessary.

However, shallowness is not just something we have to live with because of our human limitations. It can be actively valuable to avoid certain pitfalls of deep thinking. Acknowledging my own shallowness, I will sketch two of those limitations. The first is the tendency towards reductionism: if all you have is a particular cognitive framework, everything starts to look like a nail. This charge is often levied—and not without reason—towards mainstream economics and its peculiar approach to quantification. But it can be seen everywhere, and lawyers are surely not above it. By bringing other perspectives into the conversation, a shallow-but-broad contribution can remind us that those models offer us a partial, even if potentially useful, view of the world and its problems.

A shallow perspective can also compensate for another failure mode of deep thinking: conceptual overengineering. Sometimes, things are just as shallow as they seem to be. People do stupid or evil things without creating sophisticated intellectual frameworks to guide them.3 So many reasons can lead to that, some as prosaic as the need to comply with a deadline at work, others deeply worring such as a failure to recognize that the people being affected by one’s decisions are actually human. In those cases, trying to offer a deep framework for the actions under study can be descriptively and normatively problematic. From a descriptive perspective, attributing complexity to actions that are in fact simple can mislead us in the description of phenomena—as we can see by the various attempts to rationalize the Trump administration. Normatively speaking, such attempts to steelman thoughts and practices that are in fact shallow can contribute to legitimize them with a veneer of respectability. Either way, a shallower engagement with certain topics can be more productive.4

Of course, shallowness comes with its own failure modes. Sometimes, it is not enough to have a simple idea that get things 95% right, as the missing 5% are precisely what matters.5 Sometimes, breadth brings no added value, or a thought that is supposed to be shallow-but-broad is just shallow. In addition to those epistemic failure modes, shallowness can also let a scholar down from a professional standpoint. If you are moving from place to place, expect to spend a lot of time familiarizing yourself with the basics of a field before you can avoid a case of foot-in-mouth disease.

Shallowness also is not healthy in terms of brand recognition, as it means you won’t have any particular concept or domain that other scholars can associate with your name, and that you will need to spend a lot more time weaving skin-deep engagements into coherent narratives for job and grant applications. So, from an individual perspective, the optimal approach is to be deep and cultivate some breadth, rather than living with one’s shallowness.

Still, I am not sure the same is true if we look at things from a systemic perspective. Depth is certainly necessary in scholarship, and academia certainly benefits from people maximizing it as opposed to just seeking an optimal level of depth for a certain discussion. Yet, the points above suggest there is some value to having at least a few shallow people as part of the conversation. Also, depth is in the eye of the beholder: what passes as deep thinking in your corner of academe is often what your colleagues in the next department use whenever they want an example of a shallow caricature of reality.67 Given all that, I believe academic communities would do well to recognize or even foster certain types of shallowness that are conducive to insights. So, there might be some hope for us shallow academics after all.

Recommendations

Finally, the otters

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  1. This is somewhat correlated with, but ultimately distinct from, the hedgehog–fox binary, as I argue below. ↩

  2. Yet, some people manage to cultivate depth in more than one domain, without reducing them to a single concept or theme. Needless to say, I really envy those people. ↩

  3. Though, of course, intellectual frameworks can also power stupid or evil things. ↩

  4. Of course, determining when that is the case is another problem altogether, which is left as an exercise to the reader. ↩

  5. See, e.g., the periodic attempts of physicists of applying novel breakthroughs in their field to solve some well-studied social scientific issue. ↩

  6. See, e.g., some of the feuding between quantitative and qualitative scholars. ↩

  7. And, if you have been trained in more than one discipline, this can be a source of angst. ↩

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